Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
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Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
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Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.
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Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.
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The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.
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Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
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In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him.
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A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner.
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If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
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Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
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It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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A greater number of God's creatures believe in Mahomet's word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the almighty have lived by and died by?
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When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.
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Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil; it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
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Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.
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There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
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The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.
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Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."
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In idleness there is a perpetual despair.
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A man's religion consists, not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of and has no need of effort for believing.
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An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
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The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
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Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!